New York City’s Juneteenth

Frederick Douglass’ goodbye to ‘the black man’s President’ after NYC’s Council banned blacks from Lincoln’s funeral parade

Today marks the 150th anniversary of an important but neglected chapter in the history of the black experience in New York. When the Civil War ended in April of 1865, the racial hostilities that fueled New York’s draft riots two years earlier still smoldered. Amid preparations for Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession to pass through the city, the Common Council (now City Council) initially prohibited blacks from participating in the grand parade.

With support from the White House and protection from the city’s police department, some African-Americans defiantly joined the proceedings despite the ban. But for many black leaders, the Council’s hostility left a bitter taste.

So Frederick Douglass, his fellow abolitionists and sympathetic city leaders organized their own memorial event for Lincoln at Cooper Union.

Six weeks after Lincoln’s murder, a crowd variously described as “vast” and “immense” gathered at the Great Hall on Thursday evening, June 1. On stage sat representatives of many of the black fraternal societies who had intended to join the Lincoln parade, while African-American choirs from the city’s public schools performed.

Prior to introducing Douglass, a black leader named Ransom F. Wake, who led the committee that organized the event, read a lengthy statement denouncing the Common Council’s actions in what The New York Times described as “unmeasured terms.”

The tone of the event grew no less fiery when the eminent keynote speaker stepped to the podium. An orator and activist rather than a politician, Frederick Douglass never minced words.

“No people as a class have more reason to lament Lincoln’s death and revere his memory than the colored people of the United States,” Douglass said at the outset of his remarks. Yet blacks, he explained, were the only ones prohibited from fully honoring the President’s memory.

It was “hardly worthwhile for him to denounce” the Common Council’s action, stated an indignant Douglass. However, if he “should say anything, it would be that it was the most disgraceful and scandalous proceeding ever exhibited by people calling themselves civilized.”

In the golden age of American public debate, such a one-two punch often delivered a knockout blow.

But Douglass wanted to do more than simply settle the score with the racist Common Council. He wanted to remind his audience about who Lincoln was, and where the nation was heading at the time of his death.

Lincoln, Douglass said, was “emphatically the black man’s President.” This was despite the times he seemed to forsake them during the war by moving too slowly in pushing for the end of slavery.

Douglass himself had frequently criticized the President’s cautious handling of the war, and he had strongly considered supporting John C. Fremont’s bid to unseat Lincoln only one year earlier.

Even so, Douglass told the Great Hall crowd that he could vouch for the fallen President’s character. Two years earlier, he had first sat down with Lincoln at the White House. Within the first five minutes of that meeting, Douglass recalled, he discovered that Lincoln “was the only white man who could talk to a colored man without assuming an air of condescension.”

To honor the President’s legacy, Douglass advocated protection of both freed blacks and poor whites from the return of the “proud and insolent oligarchy” of the South. And “in the reconstruction of the States,” he concluded, we should not “incorporate any vestige of slavery.”

Alas, Andrew Johnson, whom Douglass detested, quickly made peace with the Confederate traitors. And that Douglass would live three more decades meant he saw the promise of Reconstruction give way to the nightmare of Jim Crow.

A century and a half later, the political and racial landscape of the U.S. and especially New York City is obviously different. Today’s multihued City Council conducts civil rights protests, and the current mayor is nothing if not proud of his biracial family.

But, as it did with the city’s attempt to exclude blacks from the Lincoln parade, the myth of an inclusive, diverse New York City has often collided with reality.

To correct the follies of its predecessor, the City Council should declare June 1 Emancipation Day in New York City.